Keep Your Head Up – Chapter 7, Act 2, Strip 12

See, that’s the problem with screaming for hours on end. There’s a good chance you’ll be confronted with something new you’ve got to scream about before you’re even done screaming about the first thing. As a result, your screams will seamlessly blend into each other, and in the end nobody can tell for sure how long precisely you screamed about what specifically. Your whole effort to clearly communicate your level of emotional distress by scream-duration gets smudged.

On the other hand, you just can’t not scream about a headless knight. It’s a too time-honored and venerable type of apparition, it would be gauche to diss it by a blase reaction. Even Gregory feels required to join in, despite the fact that he used to be a type of revenant himself for a long time, and has something of a personal history when it comes to missing parts of his body. And he does make a commendable effort, I must say. Very nice scream. Kudos.

A kight on horseback would have been even more traditional, of course, but horses are difficult to draw and don’t generally enjoy being dropped from great heights. Even leaving aside the fact that our friends didn’t take a horse along to the state fair – which, in script terms, would have been quite a contrivance and a give-away that they wouldn’t be having an entirely uneventful day at the fair.

Aside from that, it’s not even really a headless knight, it’s just Snuka, in case you didn’t recognize him in his slightly altered form. Unlike Gregory, he hasn’t gotten younger but a bit older instead, as well as generally a bit more presentable. I don’t think he’ll find much to scream about his altered appearance, once the realization sets in. His landing was a bit less elegant than the others’, but having his head rammed down into his chest cavity isn’t really something he doesn’t know how to deal with…he’s experienced that before at the the hands of Mopey and her disappearing Mallet of Doom, when he crossed certain lines (or was believed to have done so).